Francisco Vieyra is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African & African-American Studies.

He researches solidarity, survival, and empowerment strategies amongst people of color and is currently working on two main projects. In a book tentatively entitled On Our Own: Political Participation in Urban Black America, he is examining the political life of one of Brooklyn’s most disadvantaged black neighborhoods, focusing especially on how everyday residents become politicized and how they generate change. Francisco is also investigating what he calls “racial counsel,” that is, the racially-inflected information, warning, and advice that people of color pass on to other people of color to keep them safe, grounded, and happy in an unequal world. In past research, he studied pickup basketball, showing that for black New Yorkers pickup basketball is not just a sport but also an important cultural and social space in which diverse individuals can connect, enact and disseminate collective values, and share neighborhood and group information.

At Washington University in St. Louis, Francisco has taught Introduction to Africana Studies, Introduction to African-American Politics, and Urban Inequality: Racism, Segregation, & Ghettoization in the American City. In Spring 2018, he will be teaching W.E.B. Du Bois and the Origins of Modern Black Studies. At NYU, he taught Race and Ethnicity.

For his work, Francisco received a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. In 2016, the University of Michigan National Center for Institutional Diversity named him an Emerging Diversity Scholar.